THE FRUIT, AND ITS FLAVOR. 71 



beautiful as ever. I make a great account of these 

 fruits, which the farmers do not think it worth the 

 while to gather, wild flavors of the Muse, vivacious 

 and inspiriting. The farmer thinks that he has better 

 in his barrels; but he is mistaken, unless he has a 

 walker s appetite and imagination, neither of which 

 can he have. 



Such as grow quite wild, and are left out till the 

 first of November, I presume that the owner does not 

 mean to gather. They belong to children as wild as 

 themselves, to certain active boys that I know, 

 to the wild-eyed woman of the fields, to whom nothing 

 comes amiss, who gleans after all the world, and, 

 moreover, to us walkers. We have met with them, 

 and they are ours. These rights, long enough insisted 

 upon, have come to be an institution in some old 

 countries, where they have learned how to live. I 

 hear that &quot;the custom of grippling, which may be 

 called apple-gleaning, is, or was formerly, practised in 

 Herefordshire. It consists in leaving a few apples, 

 which are called the gripples, on every tree, after the 

 general gathering, for the boys, who go with climbing- 

 poles and bags to collect them.&quot; 



As for those I speak of, I pluck them as a wild 

 fruit, native to this quarter of the earth, fruit of 

 old trees that have been dying ever since I was a boy 

 and are not yet dead, frequented only by the wood 

 pecker and the squirrel, deserted now by the owner, 

 who has not faith enough to look under their boughs. 

 From the appearance of the tree-top, at a little dis 

 tance, you would expect nothing but lichens to drop 

 from it, but your faith is rewarded by finding the 

 ground strewn with spirited fruit, some of it, per 

 haps, collected at squirrel-holes, with the marks of 



